Supply chain management is the process of producing a product. Recall our focus on the importance of relationships. Well, customer relationships and supplier relationships form the critical links in a supply chain. SCM is used to speed up the throughput process to win time-based competition. To provide high-quality products at the lowest cost, SCM starts with forecasting demand for a product and then moves on to planning and managing supply and demand.

With the growth in online sales, deliveries are on the increase, and managing the delivery portion of the supply chain is becoming an increasingly important part of doing business using UPS, FedEx, USPS, and others to deliver packages. Rather than build and maintain in-house IT portals, firms now use cloud-based third-party logistics providers (3PLS). This software-as-a-service technology plugs suppliers, distributors, and customers into a single platform.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags. RFID is used in SCM to improve the efficiency of inventory tracking and management.